Lockerbie bombing: Annie Lareau's new play helps cope with survivor’s guilt

Playwright Annie Lareau, on the left, with Theo Cohen – one of the victims.

“It sounds woo-woo, but this is how it happened for me and people can believe it or not,” Annie Lareau begins, taking a deep breath.

On December 21, 1988, aged 19, Annie waved five of her classmates from Syracuse University off from the London apartment building they shared. They were flying home to the States for the Christmas holidays, with Annie following the next day.

Hours later, the drama student turned on the television, hoping to distract herself from the latest of a series of debilitating panic attacks she had been suffering, and heard news that chilled her to the bone.

270 people were killed in the Lockerbie bombing

“The BBC came on and said a plane was missing, and I instantly knew it was my friends’ flight,” she says.

The reason Annie was so sure was because she had been suffering vivid nightmares about planes exploding or cracking in half for several months. They began before she travelled to London with her classmates and increased in regularity to the point where the frequent flyer was terrified to get on a plane.

“The nightmares got worse and worse, and they turned into panic attacks, where I could be walking along the street and I’d start to shake and couldn’t breathe, convinced I was going to die. I was really embarrassed; I thought I was losing it.”

Witnessing one of the panic attacks, Annie’s best friend and roommate, Theodora Cohen, encouraged her to change her flight so they could fly home together. But the £75 charge to do so was more than Annie had. “I couldn’t afford it,” she says. “That’s the only reason I wasn’t on the plane.”

Watching the bombing of Pan Am 103 and the loss of 270 people unfold on the TV screen, Annie felt “a weird wave of relief that I finally understood the nightmares, and then a scream came out. The understanding of it and the realisation they were dead collided.”

She ran down the street to a phone box and called the Syracuse University secretary in London, who came and collected Annie and took her to the Syracuse centre in Kensington. Inside, the phones were ringing with desperate parents calling to find out about their children.

As the burning wreckage rained down on Lockerbie, Annie was handed a list of student names and told to check who was dead or alive.

“It was surreal,” she continues. “A chaotic, panicked time. The press had surrounded the building and we couldn’t get out.

“My 19-year-old brain was full of self-hatred and guilt for not understanding that the nightmares weren’t about me. I told myself I was selfish and could have stopped them from boarding. I became very overwhelmed by that guilt.”

The next day, Annie was taken to the airport for her flight home as scheduled.

“I couldn’t move my body – I was in shock and still hadn’t cried. They put me in a wheelchair to get me on the plane. At that point, it didn’t matter in my mind if I lived or died.”

A stewardess approached Annie and another Syracuse student and asked them to move to the front row of first class.

“The pilot came out, kneeled and took our hands, and he said: ‘The pilot was one of my friends and I’m godfather to his children. I promise you I’ll get you home safely.’ It was extraordinary. We must have flown over a still burning Lockerbie that day. How he did it I don’t know, but he was so kind and wanted us both moved to where he could check on us.”

Back in Syracuse, Annie struggled to cope.

“I had to pack up Theo’s belongings. I was 19, the same age as my daughter is now. This was before there were any guidelines for the US media to be dealing with this sort of thing, so I had them knocking on my door at 6am and following us around campus. We were on display and it was very intrusive. I was barely holding on.”

It didn’t help that the psychologist appointed to her at Syracuse told Annie she was making up the premonitions – which had stopped immediately after the bombing.

“That made me think I was really crazy, so I didn’t get the help I needed and I spiralled in those last 18 months at university,” she admits. “Self-punishment, pursued by the press, grief always on display.

“One of the reasons I moved to Seattle, where I still live now, was to get away from the east coast where people might know about Lockerbie if I mentioned Syracuse. I restarted my life here, finally found a therapist who believed me, and it took years to not only heal and realise there was nothing I could’ve done to help my friends, but to let people in again.

“I had been in that period of my life at university where you’re creating a new family of friends. To have that instantly taken away meant a long time passed before I would let anyone else in. I thought I was poisonous. If I loved anyone, I thought they would die, and that was something I had to work through.”

It wasn’t until 2019 that Annie visited Lockerbie. It was a life-changing experience. “I just couldn’t do it emotionally before then. I had built it up in my mind to be a town on fire, my friends’ bodies scattered across the landscape. Instead, I came face-to-face with what Lockerbie really is – a beautiful, bucolic place with incredible people. It was very healing.”

Annie has been back to the Dumfriesshire town several times since and has made connections and friendships with people like Colin Dorrance, who attended the disaster as an 18-year-old police constable, and Josephine Donaldson, who found in her garden a handbag belonging to Nicole Boulanger, one of Annie’s friends on the flight.

“I have a whole new community that I’m blessed to know and who understand the repercussions of that time more than anywhere else,” Annie explains. “To be welcomed into people’s homes, for them to show me who they are as a town, rather than just show us the scenes, has been very healing.

“Lockerbie is still a major event in Scotland and people haven’t forgotten about it there. 9/11 sort of wiped it from memory in the States. It’s comforting to go to a place where it’s still remembered.”

Inspired by her positive trips to the town, Annie has written a memoir about her lost friends and her connection to the people of Lockerbie. While she hopes to get the book published, she has, as a theatre-maker and performer, adapted her story for stage, which she will perform for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer.

“My husband has performed at the festival for the past three years and I’ve accompanied him. Last summer, conversations started about turning it into a show and it felt like if I was going to do it, it should be done in Scotland,” she says.

“It’s not just telling my story, and those of my eight friends and 35 classmates, but also Colin’s story and Josephine’s story, and other people in Lockerbie who are intertwined in it.”

Annie Lareau performing her play Fuselage.

Fuselage is a play written by and starring Annie, alongside two other actors – Peter Dylan O’Connor and Brenda Joyner. It jumps around timelines – from Annie’s first meeting with her new friends in 1986 to her first visit to Lockerbie 33 years later. Importantly to Annie, it gives an insight into her fallen friends in happier times.

“I want you to know these people. Unlike the big TV shows that are happening right now, which are about the politics or the trial or who did it, I want audiences to walk away knowing what my friends were like,” she explains.

“Theo and I met on the first day of class. We sat next to each other in orientation and instantly became friends. We were joined at the hip – one of those amazing college friendships that was instant.

“In the play, we celebrate the fun we had in the beginning. I hope to capture who these people were, to breathe life into them, so that you think about the person. I want to show the humour and joy of being in college in the ’80s, so that the audience can feel what we all lost.

“I know I’ll be exhausted by the end of each performance, but reliving the fun times we had together is healing.”

Annie adds: “People ask if it’s a healing experience for me and of course it is, to speak their names and remember the good times as well as the bad.

“But it’s hard when talking about grief that comes from an international tragedy like this, because you never know what’s round the corner – like a new TV series popping up on your screen.

“These days, I think of grief as a lake: the depth of it is always the same, but I can cross it faster than before.”

Fuselage is at the Pleasance Courtyard – Above, Edinburgh, from July 30 to August 25 (except 13 and 19)